Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel

by Keel, John A.

  But when you’re in an area where there is a UFO wave going on, you’re bound to see them. They were following a schedule in West Virginia. Every night at 8:30, you could go out and look up at the sky and one would go over. There were people with private airplanes chasing the damn things. Of course, they always got away, and we never solved the mystery. Then I discovered that at 10:00 on Wednesday nights, we seemed to have more activity than any other period of time. I mentioned this on a television station down in West Virginia. The next Wednesday night, half the country was out looking at the sky. Thank god, three of them went over in formation at 10:00 on Wednesday night. I was then considered a great seer, because I had managed to figure this out.

  There are a lot of other patterns to the phenomenon, which we can figure out if we lend ourselves to it. Going back through history, I have found that these patterns are continuous. I had to do some research into the Great Plague of the 1300s. I kept coming across references to strange atmospheric phenomenon. I kept digging into more and more books trying to find out what kind of strange atmospheric phenomenon they were talking about. It was taking place while everybody was dropping dead with the Plague. I finally found some references that described very large bright lights that were flying around these cities, especially where people were dying in droves. At that time, they assumed that it was some kind of religious phenomenon related to all the deaths that were taking place. The Indians had a belief that these were “sky ships” taking souls away into space after they died… In the ‘60s, we had a great many sightings directly over funeral homes and mental hospitals. I could never figure that out, either. Why funeral homes and mental hospitals? In the mental hospitals, the doctors and the nurses would be reporting these UFOs (not the inmates). Maybe there were inmates there that the UFOs were interested in. Inmates who had read some of my books or something… [laughter]

  I felt that the one thing that had not been properly investigated were the contactees themselves. Since we never managed to catch a flying saucer, our best evidence was the contactee. At that time in the 1960s, contactees were frowned upon. They were ridiculed. They were attacked at every corner. There were 2 or 3 contactees who had gotten rather famous, and this really irked some of the more prominent ufologists (who were very publicity-minded). There were contactees like George Adamski, who became very famous. He was much slandered and, so, towards the end of his life, he denied everything. He thought that he had been used in some fashion. He didn’t know how he had been used, but he thought something very fishy was going on – that many of the things he had believed earlier about flying saucers were wrong. But he couldn’t figure out what was really going on.

  I started interviewing contactees. And because of my magazine articles about contactees, more contactees would write to me. In fact, I was swamped with letters from all over the country. Some people had had experiences 20 years earlier, and had never told anyone, because they didn’t know exactly who to tell. Finally they’d read an article by me about contactees, and decide to get in touch with me. In the end, I dealt with probably five or six hundred people who had had some kind of contactee experience. I lost count. There were hundreds of others that I could never visit personally, or talk to on the telephone, but with whom I corresponded briefly.

  I found that there were certain patterns in the contactee phenomenon, which had been deliberately overlooked by the ET believers. There were medical effects that had been deliberately overlooked or missed, because the average UFO investigation was more of a conversation. Nobody ever examined these contactees physically, or even asked them what kind of physical affects they had suffered after their experience. It was virgin territory at that time. Fortunately, around the country there are quite a few doctors and psychologists now doing the same thing that I was doing then. But it was a long, uphill battle in the ‘60s to get anyone to pay any attention to the contactees. They were really scorned, yet they hold many of the keys to the UFO phenomenon.

  There are six basic types of contactees. Not just one, as you’d think. There are six types, with a couple of subgroups. I’ll try to explain each type and their medical characteristics.

  TYPE 1: TRANCE CONTACTEES

  The first type, Type 1, is a trance subject. This is, I’ve found, the most prevalent type. Usually this witness claims that he’s suffered paralysis – that he was unable to move a muscle or even blink his eyes. This is a sure sign that he was in a trance. We have religious miracles (name any date, they’re going on all the time) like the one in 1962 in Garabandal, Spain. Two small children would go out into a field and kneel by a bush for five or six hours. They would be in a complete trance. Hundreds of people would mill around them, watching this. When they came out of the trance, they would tell that they had had a long conversation with the “lady” that was visiting them.

  This happens over and over again in religious miracles. People are actually in a trance, but they don’t know they’re in a trance. They think they’re fully conscious. In hypnotherapy, a person will often be hypnotized and be “under” for two hours. When you bring him out of hypnosis, he doesn’t think that he’s been under for two seconds. If you tell him that he’s been hypnotized, he’ll argue with you. He’ll say, “No, I couldn’t have been hypnotized,” until he looks at the clock and realizes that two hours have passed.

  We see this over and over again in the UFO cases. People will be driving along a highway (always a secluded highway with no other cars on it) and they will see something in the sky. On rare occasions, it will be a metallic object but, mostly, it’s a light, and the light is flashing. Now, some people can be hypnotized very easily with a flashing light if it flashes at a certain number of intervals. I used to use a strobe light in my investigations. It had an adjustment on it so that it would flash at different frequencies. I would set this up and have the contactee look at it. I would adjust the frequency until the contactee would go off like that, hypnotized. This is what happens with these lights. They’re driving along a highway. They see this light. It’s flashing, and suddenly they’re in a hypnotic trance. Now an hour later, or two hours later, or a day later, they come out of the trance and they find that they’re forty miles away from where they had been. Also, they find that it’s taken them three hours to travel a distance that normally would take them thirty minutes. They’re baffled by it.

  In the beginning, the UFO investigators were baffled by it too, because they didn’t know anything about hypnosis, or about trance subjects or fairy lore. We have to take the “little people” seriously, because there’s an enormous amount of literature on them. More than there is on UFOs... The best minds of each generation have gone out and investigated fairies. There is a newsletter in England devoted to new sightings of the little people. It just goes on and on… Go to any good bookstore and pick up a book on fairy lore, and you’ll find that it is divided into sections just like the UFO books. There will be a chapter on time lapses. There will be a chapter on abductions. There will be a chapter on sexual experiences. And when you read it, you’ll think you’re reading a flying saucer book, except it’s all done in the fairy frame of reference. In the Middle Ages, the belief in fairies was very big. The fairy lights were also mentioned throughout this literature. These lights were, of course, the same thing that we’re seeing today: mysterious lights that blink on and off and put you in a hypnotic trance.

  When you’re in this hypnotic trance and you think you’re conscious, you can see almost anything, and you will swear that it’s real. When you come out of the trance, you’ll swear, “I just saw an elephant walking down Main Street.” Of course, there was no elephant. Incidentally, every year we have dinosaur reports. In Italy, they turned out the Army a couple of years ago to chase a dinosaur. Of course, they never caught it. I really wonder what would happen if they had come upon this living dinosaur. They wouldn’t want to shoot it, and I don’t know of any way to catch a dinosaur. I think that the Army would have been in real trouble. [laughter]

  Wha
t fascinates me are the kangaroo reports that we get every year from all over the country. We know there are no kangaroos in the United States, but the police are chasing them every year. We have not just Mothmen running around, but we have kangaroos, dinosaurs, and a wide variety of sea serpents. I am very interested in herpetology (snakes). I used to lecture on snakes. People used to come up to me afterwards and tell their snake stories, about the gigantic snakes that had been seen – snakes that we know are not to be found anywhere in the United States.

  Anyway, the trance subject is set off by this flashing light. We do not know the source of this light. You can say they’re from outer space; you can say they’re fairies; you can say they’re demons. It doesn’t matter. We don’t have an explanation for it. We just know that that is how it works. That’s the mechanism. And that’s only the first one.

  TYPE 2: POST - HYPNOTIC CONTACTEES

  The second type of subject is the post-hypnotic subject. Most of you know about post-hypnotic suggestion. When someone is hypnotized you tell them, “one hour after you wake up, I want you to stand up on a table and crow like a rooster.” One hour later, the subject is fully awake and all of a sudden, he doesn’t understand why he has this terrible urge to stand up on a table and crow like a rooster. That is post-hypnotic suggestion. We have that in the flying saucer phenomenon, on a large scale. This is where the witnesses just need a slight trigger. It doesn’t have to be a flashing light. It can be something else. It can be a sound over a radio or telephone that triggers them and puts them back into a trance. During this momentary trance, they will see something that isn’t there at all. One common trigger that’s used is Greek letters and Greek words. We don’t know why... UFO entities for years have been using Greek names and Greek letters. One of them called themselves “Xeno.” This was widely published for weeks before anyone realized that Xeno was the Greek word for “stranger.” It’s just Greek. Are we being invaded by Greeks from outer space? I doubt it.

  In a typical case of this sort, the person will say that he was driving past, say, a billboard. He looked at the billboard and the next thing he knew, he saw this huge saucer directly over the billboard. It was a huge machine with legs sticking out of it and people waving from the windows. Actually, it’s the billboard that set him off. There was some word or letter on the billboard that triggered the post-hypnotic suggestion.

  In investigating this type of case, I have to go over their whole life history. I do that anyway with every case but, here, you have to try to find some point in the past couple of years where they have lost some time. Usually it was where they had taken one of these drives and discovered it took them two hours to travel a distance that should have taken them thirty minutes. One has to assume that during these mysterious two hours, something happened to them. The post-hypnotic suggestion was implanted in their mind. Two years later, they come out with this absurd story. This is also a device that’s very handy for discrediting witnesses. Suppose someone has had this experience where they lost three hours. They go to me, or Dr. Hynek, or someone else and complain about it. We start investigating it. One day they call up and say, “I just saw this giant kangaroo jumping across the road.” The reason they saw the giant kangaroo was that they had been programmed to see it. Naturally we say, “Oh, if he’s seeing kangaroos, he must be a nut, so I’m not going to waste any more time with him.” But it’s more and more complicated, the deeper you get into it.

  TYPE 3: HALLUCINATORY CONTACTEES

  We have a category that really is scary, and this is what I call induced hallucinations. This is one I first stumbled across in West Virginia in 1966. I’ve come across it several times since, including on Long Island and in Ohio, and in some other states. Dr. Vallee has apparently come across it, too. In his book The Invisible College, he has one paragraph devoted to it. In the induced hallucination, you are driving along the highway or hitchhiking or whatever, and you see a light or hear a sound. You go into a trance or you pass out. You are not taken aboard a flying saucer; you are taken aboard a truck or a van. In areas of West Virginia where flying saucer reports were prevalent, in discussing it with people who lived in the area, I learned that there were a lot of mysterious trucks and vans running around. These local people are aware of everything because they live on the backroads; they don’t see anything at all for days and days. Suddenly, they’d see a mysterious van passing back and forth. They would take notice of it. These vans, as near as we can figure out, are used to examine people. Many of the abduction cases concern medical examinations. People are taken aboard these vans and they are examined. They are probably given some kind of drug, which we’ve never been able to isolate. A number of contactees have had some strange substance in their blood that we’ve never been able to identify. While they’re being examined and given these hypnotic drugs, what we call a confabulation is placed in their mind. This is done very easily in hypnosis, or with drugs. You simply tell the person that they have been to another planet, and they believe it when they wake up later on. They can fill in all the details. Their mind will fill in all the details. And they will come up with one hell of a good contact story. But the contact story doesn’t mean anything.

  Now it took me a long time to get wise to this tactic. Then I realized that there was another memory underneath the confabulation. You have to hypnotize the person many times, over a long period of time, in order to install a second memory hidden below the first memory (the confabulation). The second memory is usually much simpler. It’s simply that they are being manhandled and thrown onto this table, and that they’re being injected with something. Lights are being flashed in their eyes. They’re going through what sounds like a standard medical examination. Then they’re released. But they’re released with that memory so buried that they remember only the wonderful trip to another planet. That doesn’t mean that all of our contactees who claim to have gone to another planet are victims of this, but it means that most of them are.

  The keys to this are the physical sensations that they feel. When you’re dreaming and a mosquito comes along and bites you in the eye, you may start having a dream that you are being chased by cannibals with spears. They’ve stuck you in the eye because your mind is translating that feeling into the dream. This works in much the same way in the UFO contact. The physical sensations are the only important things in these stories. The women, especially, feel that a needle has been thrust into their stomach around the belly button. As you know, Betty Hill claimed that. But there are many other cases of that, and we’re baffled by it. One theory is that they’re using these long needles to reach the ovaries, and that may be. But I think there must be something else to it, because we find that this “needle in the navel” was important in witchcraft lore, too.

  With the men, the physical pains that they feel are often around the fingertips. Needles have been poked into their fingertips. And, by golly, if you look at their fingertips two or three days later, you’ll see marks where something has been thrust into their fingertips. Also, with the men, something is placed underneath their chin. There are glands there, and it may be some method of draining substances from these glands. Again, there’s no way to speculate, but they do have marks afterwards under their chin, where something has been definitely poked there. There are those who like to yell, “Hoaxes and liars!” But how would someone go about poking themselves under the chin with a hypodermic needle? I think it’s a little grizzly. Most people wouldn’t do it just to provide evidence.

  We don’t know what these trucks are up to. We don’t know where they’re from. We know that a couple of years ago in Montana, they did have signs on the sides that said “Smithsonian Institute.” We checked immediately with the Smithsonian, and they didn’t have any trucks running around Montana. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. So we’re dealing with a human-based group. The deeper you get into it, the scarier it gets. Those of you who read Dr. Vallee’s latest book know that he now accepts that notion. He believes that it’s an o
ld religious cult, which is maybe a workable idea. But it doesn’t make too much sense that anyone would go through all that trouble.

  In 1967, Russia had an outbreak of flying saucer attacks like this. Russia immediately issued a very long diatribe claiming that the CIA was doing it to Russian citizens, as a method of reviving religion in Russia…

  TYPE 3 SUBGROUP: DISTORTIONS OF REALITY

  My last book, The 8th Tower, was originally titled Distortions of Reality. I’ve had a number of cases where people have suffered distortions of reality. In contactee cases, it’s common for the people to say that a UFO landed beside the road and took them aboard and so on. When they go back later to find the spot where the UFO landed, they can’t find it, even though they know the road like the back of their hand… Betty and Barney Hill went back again and again to the mountains of Vermont, looking for the exact spot where they had seen this UFO. I don’t think they ever found that spot. There are many cases of this, because they’re suffering from distortions of reality. There could be a house or a landmark that doesn’t exist. You go back; you’re looking for “the white house with the red shutters.” But there is no white house with red shutters, because it never did exist. Ghost stories are filled with cases like this.